


our fortunes will scar the darkness of the future in lines of light

by luninosity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fake Character Death, Happy Ending, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-22 23:46:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9630248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: It’s the way things go, the way things always go, Steve thinks—thinks in slow-motion dread, harrowed and frozen inside and out—and it shouldn’t be the way things go. Never again. Never. Nothing shouldgo.Bucky shouldn’t—





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hitlikehammers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/gifts).



> FAKE character death. PROMISE. :D :D
> 
> Slightly belated birthday-fic for a lovely friend who deserves nice things. Title and closing poem courtesy of the brilliant Hope Mirrlees, this time.

It’s the way things go, the way things always go, Steve thinks—thinks in slow-motion dread, harrowed and frozen inside and out—and it shouldn’t be the way things go. Never again. Never.  
  
Nothing should _go_.  
  
Bucky shouldn’t—  
  
“Steve!” Bucky yells. _“Go!”_  
  
“Not without you!” Steve vows right back, an echo out of the past, a scream in the present from his bleeding heart. “Buck—”  
  
The submarine buckles under his feet. Sinking. Dying. Overhead the Wakandan helicopter hovers, manned by members of the Dora Milaje, seconded to Steve for this mission.   
  
Steve should’ve been able to handle this mission. Steve should’ve not gone on this mission. Steve should’ve never—  
  
Steve Rogers doesn’t like bullies. Steve Rogers doesn’t like petty small men with grudges and access to Cold War nuclear submarines. He’d said yes because the situation’d become urgent, because Bucky lay sleeping and silent and serene, not needing him, and he couldn’t wake Bucky from that choice but he needed to punch a would-be dictator in the face or rip a submarine apart with his bare hands, something, something he could do—  
  
He’d thought: easy, human, one submarine. No problem. Good outlet.  
  
Knocking out would-be dictators: Steve Rogers can do that all day. Hadn’t been the stumbling block. Hadn’t been the yes-problem to that no-problem flippancy.  
  
Launch codes. Locked. A countdown. No way to override. Plus: fanatically devoted robot underlings.  
  
He’s bleeding. He’d been bleeding when Bucky’d landed, light as a cat despite Winter Soldier tactical gear and black boots. Bucky’d taken one look at the situation, said, “Keep ’em off me, Steve—” and dived for the controls.  
  
Scarlet spreads sticky over his hip, but the last of the robots’ve gone down. Job: done. Bucky: protected. “Buck—”  
  
“Can’t leave you alone for one damn minute, Stevie,” Bucky says, smile sideways and beloved over mechanical corpses, “you go off hunting rogue submarine time bombs,” and then, “huh.”  
  
“Bucky,” Steve says again. Bucky’s fingers’ve paused: not typing, not entering overrides, not fiddling with technology. He must’ve known them; Steve has guesses about that, but they can talk later, they can talk about everything later— “They woke you up for this? Couldn’t let me bring you a rogue submarine as a present, could you—”  
  
“Heard you were gonna die tryin’,” Bucky retorts. His hair’s loose; his eyes are softer, and Steve wants incongruously to draw him here and now: gentle and sharp, concealing weaponry but waking from dreams to save the man he loves. “When you called in to say nobody had those codes, and they thought I might, and I do—”  
  
“You stopped it,” Steve says. “You stopped it, we should go, come on—” It’s a plea against what he’s starting to suspect. Can’t be true. No.  
  
The sub’s going down. Holes in the side. Water under their boots. Dark tide in his heart, rising.  
  
“Go,” Bucky says, and the holes swallow Steve up. “I have to stay. It’ll kick back on as soon’s I move my hand.”  
  
Steve looks. Bucky’s hand—the flesh one—isn’t simply not moving. Stuck in place. Pierced. DNA verification, perhaps; a blood sacrifice, because that’s just ghoulish enough to be the final straw.  
  
He can’t breathe. Buzzing in his ears.  
  
“It has to be me,” Bucky says, half gentle, half scolding, “it has to know it’s me, for the override, and we don’t got time to argue, not on this one. Go.”  
  
“No—”  
  
Bucky sighs. Calls up, “Hey, Parrot, swoop time.”  
  
“Wh—” Steve’s cut off. Arms around him. Sam Wilson. Landing through that hole in the roof. Wings at the ready: time to fly him out of here.  
  
“That’s you admitting I’m right, and you need my help, right,” Sam says, “and we gotta get you an ornithology book one of these days, Freezer Burn. You sure?”  
  
“ _No_ ,” Steve argues, unheard.  
  
“Get him out of here,” Bucky orders, and their gazes cross, and hold, “and I’ll owe you one, Oriole.”  
  
Steve would fight, would go on fighting, even if it’s Sam, even if it’s a friend—covered in robot dust and grease and sweat, he’s ready to take on the world and the universe and Death itself for Bucky—  
  
Sam snaps handcuffs around his wrist. Around _their_ wrists: he’s tied to Sam. With Hulk-strength bonds.  
  
Steve Rogers staggers under that weight: if he doesn’t go, Sam Wilson dies beside them.  
  
“Stevie,” Bucky says, as Steve’s gaze swings to him, as that sheer horror swings to him, “I’m sorry. God, I’m—but you gotta live, all right? If this is me then maybe I’ll have paid for some of what I’ve—and if not at least I’m gonna save your dumb ass, okay? Live. For me.”  
  
Steve’s screaming, Steve’s falling to his knees, Steve’s yanked up and out by Sam and Sam’s wings, straining to hold both of them—  
  
Steve fights and claws at air and begs and tries to dive through empty space—  
  
The submarine groans, a broken animal, and folds itself in two and implodes under pressure. Collapsing beneath swift heavy leaden seas.   
  
Salt burns Steve’s face. Seaspray, tears. Numbness. No. No.   
  
Bucky—  
  
Bucky had been sleeping, Bucky’d been peacefully awaiting rescue and recovery, the enchanted answer to the fairytale curse—Bucky shouldn’t’ve been here, couldn’t’ve been. On Steve’s mission. On Steve’s easy mission.  
  
His brain can’t wrap itself around that fact: Bucky won’t be waiting for him back home in Wakanda. Bucky’d shown up like a miracle and saved him one last time and Steve hadn’t even said half of what he should’ve said, hadn’t said an _I love you_ , hadn’t _had_ that time—  
  
His lungs cave in. His heart. He knows that feeling. He’s known it all his life: his body crumpling under what he’s asked of it.   
  
His body doesn’t know how to lose Bucky Barnes. Has never known. Never gotten used to that idea.  
  
He chokes on air, on nothing, on the nothing that’s left—  
  
He wakes at the touch of a hand. At the touch of _that_ hand: the only one that gets past cynical supersoldier reflexes. Always has.   
  
“Steve.” Bucky’s lying beside him, hand on Steve’s chest. Over Steve’s beating heart. Night-shadow catches in his tumbled hair, his pale eyes, the faint scrape of stubble on his cheeks. Velvet and vibranium, skin and scars, shirtless and bared to the kindly caress of darkness. “Steve. I’m here.”  
  
“You’re here.” Shaking, he grabs Bucky’s hand—the flesh-and-bone hand, the recognizable touch, and maybe Bucky’d thought exactly that or maybe Bucky’d flinched from awakening him with the new shiny replacement—and jerks himself more upright. Aftershocks of airlessness, of helplessness, claw at his lungs. “It didn’t happen.”  
  
“No,” Bucky says. Steve moving has meant his hand slips: still in Steve’s, but sliding from Steve’s chest. After a second he sits up too, and pulls knees up under the blanket, and wraps the metal arm around them: a silvery whisper of sound that somehow cries out in loneliness. Might be Steve’s imagination. Fanciful and all.   
  
“No,” Bucky says once more. “It didn’t happen.”  
  
“It didn’t happen like that.” He turns to face Bucky, forcing heart and breath and fancifulness under control. Bucky needs him to be strong. Bucky needs to lean on him, and Steve wants that, Steve wants nothing more than that, to be Bucky’s rock and anchor and port in storms of confused memory; Steve Rogers wants to be everything for Bucky Barnes, and so he will. No question. No cost to weigh. “It didn’t—that wasn’t what happened.”  
  
“No,” Bucky says a third time: unshakeable and talismanic, a magic charm. “We got out.”  
  
They had. The dream’d been true up to a point: the sub, the obnoxious homicidal robots, the sinking, the miraculous dream-hero appearance of Bucky Barnes. Bucky’d slammed a hand down over the console, swearing; the code had needed blood, DNA verification, that’d been real.  
  
He’d stopped it, then.  
  
They’d run for the helicopter. For safety.  
  
Steve clutches that knowledge, clings to it: “You made it out. We—we made it out.”  
  
“Made it out, made it back.” Bucky’s voice makes the statement tangible, audible, presence in his ears and his bones.  
  
They’re sitting together in bed. A week later. Secure in a royal Wakandan guest room while stars glimmer outside, with the silky wet tastes of mist and green and promises drenching the night. The bed’s firm; the blankets’re thick. Steve had wanted Bucky to be warm. Not cold.  
  
He’d stumbled over words, after. Over gazes: too full, too full of looking at Bucky, here and now and real. Too full and never satisfied, a bottomless breathless hungry ache.  
  
He’d not known how to ask: _is this one time, is it because I needed you, are you going back under, are you are you are you—?_ Bucky’d given him a crooked half-familiar smile and answered Steve’s silent plea with, “Guess I’ll stick around in case you need me more, punk.”  
  
T’Challa had vowed that Bucky would be safe. Under his protection. Bucky’d nodded: they’d work to find a cure, ways to get tangled webs of coercion out of his head—some favors were in motion, and a suspiciously unmarked package’d arrived two days ago that looked a lot like StarkTech, and Wanda’d been talking to Bucky in private yesterday afternoon—but they’d do it with him awake and alert.  
  
Bucky’s told Steve, softly, that there’s a shut-down code-word. He’d wanted Steve to know it; he himself didn’t, hadn’t been allowed to, but it’d been in the file. Steve knows the word, wishes he didn’t, and understands in the despairing center of his gut that Bucky’s right: the Winter Soldier can’t be allowed another rampage, and Bucky Barnes doesn’t want to hurt anyone again.  
  
Tactical. Heroic. Morally correct. So many reasons. And the core, the tipping-point, the final reason Steve’s said yes to this terrible responsibility: Bucky Barnes wants to not hurt people. Bucky needs his help to feel certain of this. And Steve Rogers will surrender his last breath to give Bucky Barnes what he wants.   
  
He says, “Guess I just don’t like nuclear bombs in the hands of fanatics, Buck.” As he says this he’s taking Bucky’s hand again, turning it over before he consciously realizes what he’s doing: thumb rubbing over the spot where there’s not even a mark, where Bucky’s long healed and not bleeding or trapped and dying bravely underwater.  
  
“You’re never gonna be a good liar,” Bucky points out, with affection, “you were saying my name, y’know.” He doesn’t pull away.  
  
Steve’s fingers tighten around his. “Guess I don’t like hordes of robot—”  
  
“Steve,” Bucky says, interrupting, knowing him, open and plain.  
  
Steve lets out an uneven breath that’s almost a cry, shattered glass in his throat, not giving up but giving in: Bucky’s the heart outside his body, and his body knows its heart. A flash of white streaks past the window, a shooting star, maybe, a hope or a prayer come true, a comet falling so that a wish can be made flesh. In their bedroom, Bucky Barnes uncurls arms and legs and stretches to pull Steve into them; they end up sliding down into bed in a clumsy huddle of bodies and limbs and breaths, face to face. Bucky’s fingertips come to rest on Steve’s back, light and metal-dry and cool and curious.  
  
“I had that nightmare too,” Bucky admits to him, and Steve wants to weep at this new injustice: that Bucky should have another pain piled atop the rest, because of him. “Bucky—”  
  
“Makin’ a point here, punk.” Bucky taps the fingers over his shoulderblade. They’re lying so close Steve can see every shade of interwoven blue and grey, opal and woodsmoke and sky, in those eyes; Bucky speaks less these days and more quietly, but he does talk, and he speaks like himself, mostly. Some of that’s deliberate, Steve knows, but it’s a deliberate choice: testing out facets of identities, past and present. “I was awake before you started talkin’ in your sleep. I dreamed—guess it was pretty much the same as yours. I wasn’t in time. To save you.”  
  
Simple words. Disproportionate weight.  
  
“You were,” Steve whispers. “You did.”  
  
“I did.” Bucky blinks at him, a kind of startled honesty, almost innocent in sudden starlit realization. “I did. And you did. Save me.”  
  
“I couldn’t—”  
  
“You knew me,” Bucky says. “You didn’t—you don’t give up. On me. On us. Yeah, I _know_ , Stevie, I’m savin’ myself, putting myself back together, it’s on me, I got that. I’m saying…” He pauses, gathering thoughts. Shooting-star eyes, wishes become truth, and his voice isn’t precisely wearing James Buchanan Barnes when he finishes, but neither is it wearing any other mask; he sounds like the person Steve fought for and fought beside and trusts with his soul. “I tried making a new life. Romania. I tried to keep you safe by running as far from you as I could. Didn’t work, did it…”  
  
Steve gulps down something that’s either laughter or tears. A bruise, the kind left by a staggering hit of anguish or joy.  
  
Bucky says, “Whatever I’m putting back together, I’m here to do it because you found me. I knew you, and you woke me up. We got a starting-point because of you.”  
  
“Because of _you_ ,” Steve protests. Because Bucky’s so strong, stronger than anyone: reaching out through fractured selves and red-soaked images to recognize Steve, to know Steve, to _choose_ ; that’s not Steve, that’s Bucky, this wonderful beautiful man in Steve’s arms, arms around Steve in turn, who doesn’t _see_ that, doesn’t _know_ , thinks it’s all _Steve_ —  
  
Bucky leans forward. Their noses bump. Squished together, Bucky tells him, “Quit overthinking it, Stevie, you already said we.”  
  
Steve goes a little cross-eyed trying to process this without moving a muscle, and manages, “We got out…we _did_ get out…” He knows that Bucky hears his answer: _we_.  
  
“Together.” Bucky kisses him. Bucky’s lips are warm and soft and sure; Bucky’s body’s warm and solid and unhesitating, tangled up with his, with him. “Nightmares and nuclear submarines. Evil would-be dictators. Whatever’s up next. Just give me a heads-up before you jump into a robot army and get shot, maybe.”  
  
“It wasn’t _bad_ ,” Steve grumbles, over emotion. “I totally had them handled. Completely. Didn’t need you for _that_.”  
  
“Nah,” Bucky says, fond, and sneaks his hand down to Steve’s hip, where there’s not a scar. His other hand’s caught between them, back in Steve’s own, held close: no scars there either. Others, visible and less so, but not there. “Could tell you didn’t.”  
  
“Not for _that_ ,” Steve says again, confesses, shivers against him; Bucky presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, nuzzles lightly under his jaw, murmurs, “Yeah, got it, love you too,” while starshine plays melodies across naked skin and sleek metal and inviting sheets, while Steve Rogers breathes back, “Love you, Buck—” and while wishes, hard-earned, come alive.

  
  
_After the long summer, languid with sun,_  
_The dark sky, dusty with stars, cold, glittering, silent_  
_Brought peace like sleep._  
  
_Then from the garden you saw the first star falling_  
_And called me. ‘Look,’ you said. I was too late_  
_For light’s white leap._  
_But then standing together, both together_  
_We saw the next star with a fang of ice_  
_Furrow the darkness._  
  
_Perhaps this was foretelling, hard, star-pointed,_  
_Our fortunes will scar the darkness of the future_  
_In lines of light._  
—Hope Mirrlees, “The Shooting Stars”


End file.
